Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Why is organizational climate so vitally important as we set
the context for innovation?

This was one of the key messages that came through so strongly
at the Creative Problem Solving Institute 2013 conference in Buffalo, USA.

The climate of the organisation is not the same as the
culture and it is important that we measure it. Once we have some hard data on
what the climate is, this enables us to explore ways that leaders can influence
positive climate change and leverage it to boost performance and promote creative
thinking.

If we do not introduce creative problem solving and innovation
in to a context, there is little chance of success.

What is climate?

What is culture?

Think about what is in your experience a good place to work.

What made it a good workplace?

Examples are - flexibility, location, people, org purpose
alignment, good work in the world, autonomy, play to win, different roles, very
social, build on ideas, work life balance

When you experience the great feelings, how do you
behave:committed, friendly, open,
respectful, loyal, cheerful, willing to take risks, collaborative, part of a
team, inclusive, initiative, sense of pride.

When you experience the bad feelings, how do you
behave?Examples - Procrastinate, not
productive, backbiting, dishonest, secretive, minimal amount of work, sleepy,
sporadic, disruptive, lack of caring, aggressive, sick leave, wanting to
change, only there when i had to be, blame others, paranoid, protest
everything, slouched.

So dare we say that there a correlation between workplace
and performance?

If you compare how people feel and how they perform, there
is a strong correlation. It effects their level of engagement and
retention.The magnitude of this impact
is sometimes underrated.

So to distinguish between culture and climate - culture is
the values, beliefs, traditions and reflects the deeper foundations of the organisation.What the organisation values is reinforced in
the decisions that are made.

Climate is the recurring patterns of feelings and attitudes
and behavior that members of the organisation experience.

A changing climate eventually has an impact of culture. Climate
is more visible, more on the surface and is easier to change.

They are not entirely separate - over time as you impact the
climate, you will impact the culture.But it is easier to deal with the tree at the top and what is visible
and where there is growth than by messing with the roots of the tree. When you
walk in to an organisation, you can feel the difference.

Uncover your organisation’s climate data to determine what your
current climate is by reviewing the following dimensions:

1. Challenge and involvement – determine what do they do on
day to day basis and how this links and relates to what the purpose of the organisation
is.The more people see the connection,
the more likely they are to be engaged.

2. Measure Freedom - independence of behaviour exerted by
the people such as respecting the individuals and no micro management.

3. Determine the level of trust and openness - emotional
safety in relationships.Is there enough
trust in the relationship to know my short comings.The more productive the environment will be
when people can spit out what they want to.

4. Look at the level of risk taking - how people deal with
ambiguity and uncertainty.Is there a
level of tolerance for uncertainty?We don’t
always have to jump towards dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

5. Ask if there is a climate of debate - occurrence of
encounters and disagreements between viewpoints.Is there open and frank conversation and not a
climate of taking things personally.

6. What level of idea support is there - ideas are respected
and nurtured and not thrown out immediately.Ideas not killed too soon so that they can move out the door and be
adopted.Novelty will otherwise not
survive.

7. How is conflict managed – there is positive and negative
conflict.Distinguish between conflict
and debate.Conflict results in tension
between people and leads to the deliberate sabotaging of ideas.There are also many cases where organisations
try to avoid the conflict and performance is zero unless the areas of friction
are surfaced.

8. What is the level of playfulness and humour - ability to
behave and interact in a spontaneous way.Is humour is accepted no matter the level of the person?Great climates weave this playfulness in to work.People work to make play happen.

9.How much play time is there - how much time do we have to develop
and elaborate on new ideas?

These observable and tangible behaviors can be measured.We can
easily see the stagnated organisations that cannot get stuff out the door to
the marketplace.

Climate is the one variable that can be changed – and immediately
innovation has a context and a soil in which to grow.Climate has to be constantly watched – you have
to recreate it every day.

Final notes:

1.Climate is important and palpable and it is
measurable.When you target it
specifically, you can move the needle on these dimensions.

We all have the potential for great results.It starts somewhere – it just takes one step
forward to make the impossible, possible!This was the clear message from the
top creative solving conference in the USA, CPSI 2013.

Here are some more insights that we gained:

Mary O'Hara Devereaux - http://global-foresight.net/
- was a fabulous speaker who reminded us that we used to think of the future by
extrapolating from the past.It no
longer works like that.

We need to
develop a much stronger peripheral vision and look beyond narrow viewpoints. If
we are trying to facilitate change we need to encourage our team to say yes to possibilities.

We need courageous creativity so that we can
put forward alternatives that are different from what we have today.

Mary also warned that you need to look for who is doing your
future now!There are always weak
signals of things to come and someone out there is already doing your future,
right now.Remember that our competitors
are no longer just local – they are global.

Her 4 laws of the future are:

1. Don’t over-estimate the driving forces in
the short term and underestimate their long term impacts.We cannot only respond to the immediate

2. If something is unsustainable, in the long
end it will end.Trends are indicating disruptive
shifts in work areas as follows:

Employee to entrepreneur

Career ladder to experience portfolio

Permanent to velcro relationships

Outsourcing to crowd sourcing

Physical to digital infrastructure

Organizations to social networks

Sharing knowledge to creating context for persuasive
conversations

3. Her 3rd law of the future is pay
attention to weak signals something in your peripheral vision that is noisy
enough - it could be small but if you scan the horizon, think about these weak
signals.Some examples of recent weak
signals include –

Most
knowledge workers in the world are women

Net
speak ‘OMG’ – is this a weak signal of the end of language as we know it?

3D
printing – we will soon print out household goods for homes

China
files more patents than Japan

Same
sex marriage

The
rise of the one person household

The
second middle age from 60 - 80

4. Mary’s next law of the future - beware
of conventional wisdom as it is nearly always wrong.

Take the transformation of medicine as one
example.The sacred cows have been
turned out to pasture and we turn them in to hamburgers.

Don't let the short term cancel to the long
term.

Mary’s other tips:

1. We are facing the end of work as we know it. We
are looking at more robots and more smart machines.

2. Watch for the growing irrelevance of
knowledge.There is more and more
knowledge generated but we have to make sense of the knowledge.Sense making is now king.The real challenge is leveraging knowledge in
the age of big data.

3. Look out for the rise of the individual and the ME
economy.We want the capability of hyper
personalization to live our dream.